Sean Walberg’s blog

DivX -> VCD Conversion

Nov23rd, 20039:38 pm

For a while now I’ve been wondering how to convert an .AVI file into a VCD, having tried once or twice but ending up stuck. Recently, a friend sent me a show he taped from TV, which prompted me to try again. I succeeded, and here’s how I did it.
The basic steps in converting any digital movie into a VCD seem to be the following:

Transcode the file into an MPEG II audio and MPEG I video stream

Recombine the audio and video streams into one file

Create a VCD image out of the resulting file

Burn the image to CD

Note that there are lots of other things that can be done, such as titles, effects, multiple movies, etc, but this is the simplest case.
The first step is what caused me the most grief, since the file I had wasn’t in a format that transcode knew about

The input A/V codecs can be autodetected. After the transcode step, you’ll have two files, BASENAME.{m1v,mpa} containing the video and audio streams respectively.
Note, to extract the audio to an mp3, you can do something like

1

transcode -i FILE -x NULL -y null,lame -o foo

which will generate foo.mpg. You can use -E and -b to specify the sampling frequency and bitrate respectively.
After you have the video and audio streams, you put them back together: